Two years ago, Obama should have been rebuked but instead was reelected. Last night, he finally got the rebuke he deserved.
Republicans, at every level, won just about everything. You can’t call this a victory for Republicans, because Republicans have yet to demonstrate in practice — or even articulate, in words — what they actually stand for.
Some Republicans are better than others, for sure. The new leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, is already talking about “working with the White House.” How can you work with people when you disagree in principle on just about everything? (Or maybe some Republicans don’t disagree in principle — and this is the problem.)
This is the kind of defeatist thinking that has made Republicans, particularly since Reagan, the outright losers that they are — even when they win. You can’t cede the agenda to your enemy and then pretend it’s still your enemy. Republicans, if nothing else, should make Obama’s life pure misery, and cause him to leave office in a veil of anger and frustration. Obama deserves it personally for the harm he has inflicted on the entire country for the past six years but, more than that, his ideas deserve to be buried in the proverbial ash heap of history.
Then there are the different kind of Republicans, like Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia. Last summer, Brat (in a Republican Party primary) ousted Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor from his seat, a rather stunning development. Brat is the kind of Republican who could actually turn his party into a second party, rather than the mealy-mouthed “me too, please don’t hit me, master” mindset of Republicans currently in charge.
Consider Brat’s position on Social Security and Medicare. Brat has criticized both political parties for not addressing Medicare and Social Security, stating, “neither side of the aisle will talk about the most important issues because that is going to involve pain.” Brat advocates “market-based reforms” to these programs, as in his view, it is unfair that people pay less than they take out so these programs have to be slashed or eliminated. He advocates for private Social Security accounts.
Brat advocates for an end to tax credits, deductions and loopholes, and calls for a flatter and more efficient tax code. If he means by that flat and really low, then he’s on to something. And if he’s willing to cut — massively cut — the government agencies and programs required to pay for massive tax cuts, then he’s on the right track as well. No, this won’t happen in the next two years, for sure. But somebody has got to start proposing it, in laws and budgets.
Brat has indicated he opposed the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 and has stated that, if elected, he would “vote against bills that benefit big business over small business”. He has stated: “I’m not against business. I’m against big business in bed with big government.” Exactly. Business is bad only when it teams up with the government. Government intervention is what makes business more political and less accountable to customers (for profit) and more accountable to politicians (for pull.) We’ve got to have separation of economics and state for the same reason we have separation of church and state. Until or unless more people start to get this, nothing will ever change — and will in fact just keep getting worse.
Although Brat has stated he does not identify as a Randian or Objectivist (and appears to be Christian), he has acknowledged having been influenced by Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and has expressed appreciation of Ayn Rand’s case for human freedom and free markets.
This is not your daddy’s, nor even your granddaddy’s, Republican Party. If people like Dave Brat mean what they say, we might actually get to real hope and change. Rationally defined, hope and change involve facing reality and owning up to the colossal mistakes of government not just in Obama’s term, but for most of the last 75-100 years or so, starting with going off the gold standard and inaugurating spending on the now dying entitlement state.
True hope and change will mean pain. But pain is not an option, not when you’ve been making colossal mistakes. Just as a former drug addict or alcoholic will tell you it wasn’t easy, a government spending itself into insolvency and eventual oblivion must experience some discomfort in the transition back to rationality. Nobody would deliberately choose pain and suffering. You accept pain and suffering in order to acknowledge the facts, deal with them and move on. Nobody in the leadership of either political party has been doing that, particularly in the last decade or so, and this is why we have a debt too staggering to contemplate. And nothing to show for it other than a stagnating economy, little or no innovation, and a health care “system” even more mired in bureaucracy, arbitrary government regulation and widespread inefficiency (translation: danger) than ever before. Obama deserved a punch in the political face for that, but we still have to remember that a majority of us put him there, and kept him there.
Obama, by the way, will not ever bend, compromise or apologize for anything. He’s a narcissist, the perfect kind of personality to have leading an ideology — socialism, Communism, statism, whatever you wish to call it — impervious to the lessons of history, the facts of reality, the laws of economics and the basics (self-responsibility, incentive, rational self-interest) that human nature requires.
Brat, by the way, won with 61 percent of the vote in his Virginia race for the U.S. House of Representatives. Candidates like him cannot win everywhere, but they can win. It’s people like him we’ll be counting on, not only to trample Obama but to keep his own Republican Party from giving in to its psychological compulsion to please, apologize, compromise and humble themselves wherever possible.
If any real change — of the kind Brat is talking about — ever comes to our government (and assuming it’s not too late), then it will come from that wing of the party. It’s a tall order.
Yesterday’s election shows that while America’s political system and government may be on fiscal and moral life support, it’s not dead yet.
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